‘The Kitchen’ Movie Review: Daniel Kaluuya’s Directorial Debut Impresses
While The Kitchen’s sociopolitical underpinnings could’ve used more meat around the bone, its technical direction and lead performances from Kane Robinson and Jedediah Bannerman make it a worthwhile watch.
Daniel Kaluuya makes his feature directorial debut with Kibwe Tavares in The Kitchen. Co-written by Kaluuya and Joe Murtaugh, the film is set in a dystopian future in London where all social housing has been eliminated. The last who remain in a social building fight for their rights in an environment named “The Kitchen,” where Lord Kitchener (Ian Wright) gives the atmosphere a lived-in, close-knit environment through his daily radio show.
In The Kitchen lives Izi (Kane Robinson, AKA Kano), who is saving money to buy a single-occupancy apartment in London’s new housing facilities. He works in a funeral home called “Life After Life,” where the deceased contribute to protecting Earth’s environment by transforming into a tree. During a funeral service, he meets Benji (Jedediah Bannerman), a young boy who is grappling with the loss of his mother. Benji suspects that Izi may know more than he says about his mother and begins to spend time with him.
By then, we pretty much know where the film is heading – Izi is more than likely Benji’s absentee father, who left her mother when she was probably very young and pregnant with his child. The two begin to reconnect without Izi telling Benji that he is his dad, but actions speak louder than words. Once Benji begins to hang out with gang leader Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr), Izi attempts to protect him from the dangers of being with someone who only wants to bring [dis]order into the Kitchen.
As social housing is now illegal in London, residents of The Kitchen are illicitly occupying the territory, which prompts regular police raids as the government attempts to displace people from their homes. Staples leads a resistance movement against the police, but his methods threaten the safety of its residents, as he directly invades the homes of people who have decided to move away from the Kitchen. Izi is on the middle side of the conflict, on good terms with Staples but vehemently disagreeing with his methods.
This gives a rather interesting conflict to The Kitchen, but Kaluuya and Tavares barely explore it, making Staples a quasi-antagonist rather than a figure sending its residents to their doom without even realizing or thinking his actions have consequences. That’s not saying Ikpoku Jr is bad – far from it – but his character is so underdeveloped that any of the sequences where Benji hangs out with them (and there are a lot) feel more like an afterthought than scenes where we begin to understand Benji as a character torn by a stable (but challenging) life he could have with Izi, or walking down a dark path with Staples.
Because of this, the one moment where he wakes up and realizes who Staples really is, no matter the brutality of the sequence itself, falls more flat than it should, no matter how great the technical direction from Kaluuya and Tavares is and its lead performances. We’re left with a shell of antagonist and undercooked sociopolitical themes that make The Kitchen feel more incomplete than an interesting exploration of a bleak future where residents must fight for the future of social housing (though it is happening now) while the powers that be attempt to get rid of it to benefit the pockets of the 1%.
However, when the film ultimately focuses on the relationship between Izi and Benji, it more than shines. Kano and Bannerman have incredible chemistry in a movie that’s less interested in figuring out if Izi is Benji’s father and more compelled to explore the humanity in this unnatural relationship between the two. When Benji asks Izi if he is his father, which occurs near the movie's end, it almost doesn’t matter: the two will be connected through their experiences in the Kitchen, whether he is his father or not. This subversion of a clichéd storyline gives Kaluuya more than the opportunity to focus on the two characters and their relationship with each other and the environment they live in, rather than a classic “is he/is he, not the father?” story that we have all seen before, and are tired of.
Marry that with some truly impressive setpieces from a technical perspective, particularly the raids, which feel harrowing and devastating, and The Kitchen has enough meat to make it an experience that’s at least palatable to the eyes of the viewer, even if its flaws stick out like a sore thumb. But as a directorial debut, it gives Kaluuya the blueprint to make his subsequent efforts better and more technically averse than his first impressive – albeit undercooked – feature, and will hopefully pave the way for him to make his mark on cinema much sooner than later.